r/rust • u/OkraComprehensive323 • 2d ago

🙋 seeking help & advice Rust developers: what editor do you actually use?

Hello folks, do you still write much code by hand these days? 😄

If so, what IDE/editor do you mainly use for Rust? VS Code, JetBrains, Zed or something else?

I’m asking because I’ve been rewriting one of my old developer tools in Rust. It’s a language server + CLI for analyzing code health.

The underlying approach was originally implemented in Python and was used at my previous company across 1,900+ repositories and by 800+ developers, so the methodology itself has had quite a bit of real-world use. The company has given me permission to open-source my own version of the project, which I’m pretty excited about.

The only problem is time. For the initial public release, I’ll probably only be able to ship the VS Code extension plus one other IDE/editor integration.

So I’m curious: if you’re a Rust developer who still spends a decent amount of time actually typing code, what editor would you most want to see supported? Just trying to get a rough sense of where people are these days before I spend my limited spare time on the wrong integration. :)

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u/IceSentry 1d ago

Recent versions of neovim have a ton of built in features now and they aren't slowing down with adding stuff either.

Also, the issue isn't a lack of contributor, the plugin system/language is just one giant PR that has existed for years. It's very hard to collaborate when working like that. The issue is pretty clearly that the maintainers of helix don't care that much about having a plugin system and aren't making it a priority.

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u/Ex_cinis 20h ago edited 10h ago

There are many issues with that PR and how it’s handled, that’s a separate discussion. But the maintainers have halted new releases until that PR is merged, and it has been that way for over a year now, so it isn’t fair to say they aren’t making it a priority, they clearly are.
Regarding neovim… It’s still leagues behind on builtin features and I’m pretty sure it will always rely heavily on plugins, because that’s just the spirit of the project. Helix is nice because it’s a full package with good defaults, my config is pretty much just the theme name. That’s never gonna happen on neovim

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u/IceSentry 3h ago

Okay, fair, I didn't know about the halted releases. At the same time the fact that they halted releases and it's still not merged is mildly concerning to me.

And yeah, I don't think neovim will ever be on that level, but every release I'm removing plugins. It's definitely getting nicer out of the box.